Power restored after ‘equipment issue’ cuts electricity for 19,300 in SLO County, PG&E says
Roughly 19,300 customers were briefly without electricity Tuesday, after an apparent PG&E equipment failure knocked out power for thousands across San Luis Obispo County.
PG&E spokesman Mark Mesesan said that at around 1:24 p.m. customers with circuits in Atascadero, Cayucos, Cambria and Baywood all lost power. The utility company began investigating an “equipment issue” at its electrical substation in Templeton in response, Mesesan said.
Meanwhile, businesses, traffic lights, homes and even schools across the county were without electricity.
Cal Poly and Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo both briefly lost power. Cal Poly professors were “asked to use their best judgment to decide whether they can proceed with their classes,” spokesman Matt Lazier told The Tribune in an email during the outage.
Power also went out at one of the county’s biggest tourist destinations — Hearst Castle in San Simeon.
Dan Falat, superintendent of the State Park district that includes Hearst Castle, said that he was in a meeting in the Hearst Castle Theater conference room when the lights went out.
“I guess the meeting was over,” he said later with a chuckle.
Hearst Castle has generator power, so tours continued as usual, Falat said.
Through monitor cameras, “I could see that the holiday lights were still on,” he added.
Power was restored to all customers across the county by 2:02 p.m.
North Coast was prepared
Thanks in part to PG&E’s warnings about Public Safety Power Shutoffs, many on the North Coast were ready for outages, armed with generators, lanterns, flashlights, backup battery power and other sources of electricity.
Blackouts aren’t all that uncommon on the North Coast, so even the little kids at Cambria Grammar School weathered the outage with little or no reaction or problems, according to staff. However, the school’s internet connection was still down 45 minutes after the power went back on.
Some who’ve been in business a long time in town reminisced about “the old days” of 15, 20 or 25 years ago.
“Remember when the power was off for about 10 days?” mused Jay Somers of Indigo Moon restaurant. “This sort of thing used to happen every other week. We’d be serving 110 dinners with no power. Then PG&E replaced the transformers and the underground wires in our area. Now we’ve also got battery backups everywhere important.”
But the internet glitches can be problematic.
“We have to tell customers, ‘As long as you have cash or check, we’re fine!’ ” he said.
This story was originally published November 12, 2019 at 1:42 PM.
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